Thelonious Monk — Epistrophy — Listen, watch, download and discover music for free at Last.fm piano Thelonious Monk composed the jazz standard Epistrophy, often considered his signature tune, in 1942. It appears on several studio albums and is a constant in his live shows. Its angular and slightly discordant style show a break with previous jazz forms, as well as with contemporaneous bebop composers. In addition to providing a perfect showcase for Monk's improvisations, though, the driving yet slightly off-balance tune has proven consistently popular and is now a standard among jazz musicians everywhere. Don't want to see ads? Subscribe now Similar Tracks Thelonious Monk, Created Wry Jazz Melodies and New Harmonies Thelonious Monk, Created Wry Jazz Melodies and New Harmonies By JOHN S. WILSON Thelonious Monk, the pianist and composer whose wry, angular melodies and unusual harmonic progressions are among the most striking contributions to the jazz repertory, died yesterday in Englewood Hospital in New Jersey at the age of 64. He had suffered a stroke on Feb. 5. Although Mr.

Monk's music was rooted in the stride-piano tradition of Willie (The Lion) Smith, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington, it stood apart from the main flow of jazz. ''He hasn't invented a new scheme of things,'' Paul Bacon wrote in the jazz magazine The Record Changer in 1948, ''but he has, for years, looked with an unjaundiced eye at music and seen a little something else. ''He plays riffs that are older than Bunk Johnson but they don't sound the same. His beat is familiar but he does something strange there, too. He can make a rhythm almost separate, so that what he does is inside or outside it. Monk is really making use of all the unused space around jazz, and he makes you feel that there are plenty of unopened doors.'' 'An Original' Randy Weston, a pianist who studied with Mr. Monk, has called him ''as complete an original as it is possible to be'' and he cites the unifying ''simplicity'' in his music. ''Not that his music isn't often complex to execute,'' Mr. Weston explained, ''but it always comes through so clear and accurate, so uncluttered.

His music is simple in the sense that it has totality of personality. It's all him.'' Among his works were ''Round Midnight,'' ''Straight No Chaser'' and ''Well, You Needn't.'' The strange contours of Mr. Monk's tunes led the jazz critic Whitney Balliett to describe them as rippling ''with dissonances and rhythms that often give one the sensation of missing the bottom step in the dark.'' When Mr. Monk was a guest at a jazz class at Columbia University, the lecturer turned to him and asked if he would ''play some of your weird chords for the class.'' Mr. Monk bridled. ''What do you mean, weird?'' he asked. ''They're perfectly logical.'' ''Jazz,'' he said on another occasion, ''is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figurations, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.'' A Dancing Conductor His way of doing things differently -but, as he insisted, logically - extended beyond playing and composing. During a performance with his group, he often got up from the piano and went into an intense shuffling dance. This was his method of conducting.

He might be setting a rhythmic pulse to move his musicians into the rhythm he wanted or simply checking to make sure that the performance was swinging properly. Mr. Monk once explained the difference between himself and the bop musicians with whom he was often associated in the 1940's: ''They think differently, harmonically. They play mostly stuff that's based on the chords of other things, like the blues and 'I Got Rhythm.' I like the whole song, melody and chord structure to be different. I make up my own chords and melodies.'' Self-Taught Musician Mr. Monk was a man of unwavering musical principles, strong opinions and sardonic wit. When a saxophonist, Sahib Shihab, told him that he was going back to the Juilliard School to study, the largely self-taught Mr. Monk remarked, ''Well, I hope you don't come out any worse than you sound now.'' Thelonious Sphere Monk, whose father was also named Thelonious, was born on Oct. 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, N.C.

When he was 4, his mother brought him and two other children to New York, but his father remained in the South. In the early 1930's, the family moved into a small apartment on West 63d Street in the area known as San Juan Hill, where Mr. Monk continued to live until a few years ago, when the building was torn down. He began playing in bands when he was 13. Four years later he joined a group that traveled with an evangelist (''She preached and feared and we played,'' he said). When the troupe reached Kansas City, Mary Lou Williams, the pianist, who became one of his close friends, heard him and reported later that ''he was playing the same style then that he is now.'' In the late 30's and early 40's, Mr. Monk was the pianist in the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where young and then unknown musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke came to jam. The music that became known as be-bop developed out of the sessions. Went His Own Way Mr. Monk, however, was not part of the be-bop movement.

He went his own way. To the public who found the ''boppers'' strange, he was even stranger and more difficult to accept. His first slight brush with success came in 1944. Bud Powell, the pace-setting pianist of the 40's who had been influenced by Mr. Monk, persuaded Cootie Williams, in whose orchestra Mr. Powell was playing, to record Mr. Monk's tune ''Round Midnight.'' In the same year he made his first records with a group led by the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, who, unlike most jazz musicians who came up in the 1920's, was interested in the new jazz developments of the 40's. Mr. Monk's first records under his own name, for the Blue Note label in 1947, gained some attention in black areas of large cities. But white listeners tended to reject him because, as Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records pointed out, ''They thought he lacked technique.'' His Cabaret License Revoked He was getting only occasional work in the late 40's, and even that was cut off completely when, in 1951, he and a friend were arrested for possession of narcotics.

Although Mr. Monk was known to be ''clean'' and was widely considered to be innocent in this case, he took the full blame, refusing to be what he called ''a drag'' by implicating his friend. He served 60 days in jail but, what was much worse, he lost his cabaret card, without which he could not perform in a New York club. For the next six years, until 1957, he recorded occasionally. Most of his time was spent composing many of the tunes that became the core of his repertory, including ''Bemsha Swing,'' ''Blue Monk,'' ''Little Rootie Tootie'' and ''Pannonica,'' named for Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter. The Baroness had befriended several jazz musicians of the period, including Charlie Parker. In 1957, with the help of the Baroness, Mr. Monk regained his cabaret card and started to play at the Five Spot in New York. The club became a steady base for him. Success in the 60's During the late 50's, he led a quartet that included John Coltrane, the saxophonist.

In the 1960's, Mr. Monk finally gained the recognition that had eluded him for almost 20 years. He worked regularly with a quartet featuring Charlie Rouse, the tenor saxophonist, appearing in clubs and at concerts and festivals all over the world. He also gave concerts with large orchestras, playing his compositions at Town Hall in 1959, at Philharmonic Hall in 1963 and in Carnegie Hall in 1964. In the 1970's, his public appearances became infrequent because of illness. His last official performance was at Carnegie Hall in 1976, although he sat in informally one night after that at Bradley's on University Place. Mr. Monk, who lived in Weehawken, N.J., in recent years, is survived by his wife, Nellie; a son, Thelonious Monk Jr., who is a drummer, and a daughter, Barbara. A funeral service will be held Monday at 11 A.M. in St. Peter's Church, Lexington Avenue at 54th Street. The body will be at the Walter B.

Cooke Funeral Home, 85th Street and Third Avenue, Saturday from 4 to 9:30 P.M. and Sunday from 11 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. Thelonious Monk | Jazz Quotes Jazz Quotes Thelonious Monk Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer considered “one of the giants of American music”. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including “Epistrophy”, “‘Round Midnight”, “Blue Monk”, “Straight, No Chaser” and “Well, You Needn’t”. Monk is the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70. # 15 Quotes I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing? even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years. ∞ Wrong is right. ∞ I don’t conside myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don’t have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself. ∞ I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired, that’s all there is to it. ∞ Well, I enjoy doing it. That’s all I wanted to do anyway. I guess, you know, if I didn’t make it with the piano, I guess I would have been the biggest bum. ∞ Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears. ∞ I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public want ? you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing ? even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years. ∞ I’m famous. Ain’t that a bitch? ∞ Where’s jazz going? I don’t know? Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

∞ Miles’d got killed if he hit me. ∞ At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There’s a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what’s shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand. ∞ I don’t know where jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens. ∞ A genius is the one most like himself. ∞ Just because you’re not a drummer doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.

∞ I didn’t know there were 2 ten o’clocks in a day… ∞ Thelonious Monk Thelonious Monk Advertisement Thelonious Monk Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and moved with his family to New York City at the age of four. His father wasn�t around the family much but did play a few musical instruments including harmonica and piano which may have influenced Monk�s interest in music at an early age. Thelonious studied trumpet briefly and began on piano at the age of nine. He was a musical prodigy from the beginning and in his early teens would play organ with a local church and won �amateur hour� competitions at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. His early influences on the piano included James P Johnson and Willie �The Lion� Smith. Monk dropped out of high school after his sophomore year to take a gig playing piano for a traveling evangelist and faith healer. After a few years he returned to New York and gigged with his own group until 1941, when he was hired by Kenny Clarke to be the house piano player at Minton�s Playhouse in Harlem.

It was here bebop began at late night jam sessions with Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Bud Powell and others. Thelonious was known as �The High Priest of Bebop� for his role in its creation. Despite this, Monk had a style so unique and ahead of his time that the critics and even many jazz musicians didn�t know what to think about him. In 1944, Coleman Hawkins hired Monk for his first steady gig and first recording. It wasn�t until Monk was thirty years old, a seasoned veteran and great innovator of jazz, that he was signed to his first record deal with Blue Note in 1947. Monk recorded several records on the Blue Note label into the early �50s which at the time did not do very well and are considered classics today. It wasn�t until 1955, after recordings with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Milt Jackson, that Monk finally began to receive the appreciation he deserved. Also helping was the release of �Thelonious Monk play Duke Ellington�, designed to help audiences grasp the brilliance of Monk�s playing.

By the 1960s, Monk was touring the world playing with his quartet featuring Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore or Larry Gales on bass, and Frankie Dunlop or Ben Riley on drums. In 1964, Monk became only the third jazz musician ever to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. In �68 Thelonious recorded his last album with the Columbia label, with Oliver Nelson�s orchestra, and due to its lack of success was dropped from the record label. After this, Monk played publically more sparingly and made his last public appearance in 1976. In 1982, Thelonious Monk had a stroke and went into a coma and passed away twelve days later. In 1993 Monk was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and in �96 a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was also created in his honor in addition to many television and musical tributes. "I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me." � Thelonious Monk Please share your favorite JazzontheTube.com videos with your friends and colleagues That's how we grow.

Monk: The High Priest of Jazz The High Priest of Jazz LEWIS LAPHAM • April 1964 LONGFORM REPRINTS This article originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and is reprinted on Longform by permission of the author. Hear Lewis Lapham discuss this article and more on the Longform Podcast . At the end of the hall on the ground floor of a tenement on New York’s West 63rd Street, behind a rickety door, in three small rooms littered with cardboard cartons, catsup bottles, half-empty suitcases, Japanese dolls in glass boxes, soup dishes stacked on a piano, team irons, clothes hanging from nails in the fiberboard walls, shopping bags and children’s toys, lives Thelonious Sphere Monk. There he has lived all but seven of the 43 years of his life, first with his mother, his brother and his sister, and then with his wife and two children, entangled in a domestic clutter wholly inappropriate to his reputation as the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz. Among all the jazz musicians of his generation, none was reported “further out” than Monk.

Tales of his strangeness drifted through the stale and noisy air of every jazz joint. The hipsters, taking his name for an obscure joke, called him “The Mad Monk” or “The High Priest of Bop.” They made much of his clumsy dances, his fondness for silly hats, hit gift for cryptic and whimsical statement. (In response to the question “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he once told a disc jockey, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”) It was always assumed that he could be found in some dark back room, a remote, if not imaginary, figure, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But all the while, oblivious to the smell of boiling cabbage in the corridor, he has remained on West 63rd Street, a sentimental man with kind eyes and a full beard, playing his blunt and angular jazz on the grand piano in his kitchen. Now suddenly, after 20 years of neglect, the critics are beginning to suspect that Monk may be the dominant jazz musician of his time.

His conception of rhythm and harmony has influenced the playing of such dissimilar musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Several of his tunes, among them Around About Midnight, Off Minor, and Epistrophy, have become jazz standards. His use of dissonance is analyzed in composition courses at the Julliard School of Music. Recently published articles assign him a niche in the development of jazz comparable to those of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. And yet, notwithstanding his new fame, the old rumors persist. Ask anybody who does not know him well, and he will say, “Yeah, man, that Monk, he’s a funny cat, man, he’s something else.” Contrary to the prevalent gossip, Monk is neither crazy nor putting on an act. The story of his life is the story of an honest man in a not-so-honest world. In many ways naïve, believing—as he once told a trumpet player, “the truth is not supposed to hurt you”—Monk never learned to tell the convenient lies or make the customary compromises. That he should have been proclaimed the complete and perfect hipster is an absurd irony.

An emotional and intuitive man, possessing a child’s vision of the world, Monk talks, sleeps, eats, laughs, walks or dances as the spirit moves him. Sometimes he neglects to go to bed for three days; at other times he will speak to no one, not even to his wife, Nellie. Harry Colomby, a New York high-school teacher who has managed Monk for 10 years, still finds it difficult to approach his only client. “I feel like I’m breaking in on his private world,” Colomby said, “like I’m somewhere I don’t belong.” The center of Monk’s world is his junkyard apartment. Fires apparently caused by faulty wiring have gutted it twice, but Monk has refurnished it rather than move away. He knows the neighborhood and the people who live there. Distant places on the other side of Central Park or across the Hudson River seem to him foreign and uncertain, inhabited by unreliable people who, for no apparent reason, one day ask for your autograph and the next day want to put you in jail. A few weeks ago, safe inside his apartment, it occurred to Monk to talk. It was shortly before midnight, and he had just returned from a recording session.

He wore an elegantly cut sharkskin suit, a purple shirt made of Japanese silk, a dockworker’s cap and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. He had brought his music home in a torn manila envelope bearing the imprint of a secondhand furniture store in Brooklyn. To calm himself, he first took a can of grape soda from the icebox and then sat down at the piano. While he played Lulu’s Back in Town, Nellie rummaged through the bedroom in search of his slippers. Married to Monk for 17 years, Nellie watches over him as if he were one of the children, even picking out his clothes in the morning. “We don’t talk much,” she said, “but I just like being with him.” After about 20 minutes Monk stood up and started pacing between the icebox and the kitchen sink. He edged around chairs, ironing boards, and a typewriter balanced on a stack of old telephone books, steadily smoking cigarettes and producing at least three gold lighters from his various pockets. As he passed the piano on his tours of the room, he would occasionally reach down and play a progression of major or minor chords, depending on his mood.

Monk stands steadfastly erect, carrying himself with a dignity that marks him as a man of serious purpose. He speaks in a soft drawl, slurring his words and ending his sentences with the question. “You dig, man, you dig?” He talks the same way he plays a tune, fixing upon one theme and running it through numerous variations, worrying it and taking it apart until he gets it right. He began with the subject of his reputation. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man,” he said. “A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’ ... but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.” Rumors of Monk’s eccentricity have followed him all his life. Named after his father, he was born October 10, 1920, in Rocky Mount, N.C. His mother, a civil-service worker and a Jehovah’s Witness, brought him to New York when he was four. His father, who was ill, preferred to live in the South. Except for one summer as the mascot of the fire department in Batavia, N.Y., he grew up in the West 60’s, a Negro ghetto known as San Juan Hill.

Nellie, who first saw him on a neighborhood playground when she was 12, remembers him as a polite but determined little boy who went his own way. “Even when Thelonious was a kid,” she said, “he knew exactly who he was.” He took his first piano lessons when he was eight; at the age of 15 he was playing jobs in local dance halls and cafés, insisting on his already unorthodox harmonies. At high school he excelled at mathematics and basketball and ignored the bitter arguments about racial prejudice. “When I was a kid,” he once remarked to his white manager, Colomby, “some of the guys tried to get me to hate white people and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.” Before he was 17 Monk quit school and joined a troupe of wandering evangelists. The troupe disbanded in Kansas City. Monk found work playing in the local dives, where pianist Mary Lou Williams, who later became a prominent exponent of the modern style, first heard him.

“He was playing the same chords then as now,” she said, “only then most people called it ‘zombie music.’” Back home in New york in 1939, Monk, bypassed by the war, began to explore the possibilities of the new sound with a number of other musicians, most notably Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Gradually, over a period of six or seven years, during innumerable jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and Kelly’s Stable on 52nd Street, there evolved the jazz known as “bop.” Bop at first seemed a form of exaggerated and satirical protest against the predictable regularities of dixieland and swing. The music emphasized harmonies previously judged dissonant. The rhythms became more complex; sudden gaps appeared in the melodic line. Remembering the early days of the new jazz, Monk said, “We had to compose a lot of music to bring out certain harmonies. I mean, man, the music wasn’t on the scene.” A few musicians managed to use the new style to their commercial advantage, but Monk failed to do so. Part of his failure to be taken seriously resulted from his antics on the bandstand.

His taste in hats, for example, runs to berets, fezzes, Chinese-coolie hats, baseball caps and a miscellaneous assortment of fedoras, derbies and skullcaps. Once seated at the piano, he becomes transfixed by the music, an expression of open mouthed surprise on his broad face, like that of a child watching a magician change oranges into rabbits. He stomps both feet on the floor, and his whole body follows the rises and falls of the melodic line. In the early 1940’s the hipsters, anxious to appear cool in all things, interpreted this enthusiasm as an affectation. They likewise dismissed his dancing as a sideshow. If he is not playing himself, Monk stands up to conduct his band, shambling around the state in an awkward approximation of the buck-and-wing, grunting, snapping his fingers, suddenly thrusting his open palm at the drummer or the tenor to indicate a solo. At such moments he resembles a meandering, but musical, duck. “When he dances,” said one musician, “that means he’s satisfied with what he hears . . .

he used to say to me ‘if the groove is really driving, then feet will move.’” Despite his recent recognition, some nightclub owners and critics still complain of Monk’s bizarre mannerisms. The complaints bewilder him. “I don’t imitate anybody,” he said. “I have my own way of walking and talking. They want me to smile at the audience or play every forty minutes, like a train schedule or something, but I can’t be grinning at somebody’s face for nothing, man. I’m thinking how to play, and I ain’t got time for that fancy stuff.” The fierce intransigence of his convictions also hurt him commercially and often frightened people. In a milieu where departures from conventional morality are considered proper if not obligatory, Monk remained embarrassingly square. After quitting work at four a.m., he would go dutifully home to Nellie. “He’s so straight, it makes you nervous,” Colomby said.

“A man’s not supposed to be that way in this business.” Charlie Rouse, the tenor saxophonist in Monk’s band for the last five years, made the same point, offering an example of what he called “Monk’s unbending guts.” He and Monk once were driving to Baltimore to play a week’s engagement at a club. Monk stopped at a motel in Newcastle, Del., in hopes of using the men’s room. He did not know that the motel discouraged Negroes. “I was asleep in the back of the car,” Rouse said, “or I could have told him not to do that. … He just doesn’t think about those segregation things.” The manager of the motel asked Monk to leave, but, because Monk seemed slow about going, the manager summoned the police. By the time the first cop arrived, Monk had returned to his car. The cop tried to pull him out of it. Puzzled and offended, Monk shook the cop off. “After that, man,” Rouse said, “it was awful. Cops jumping out of squad cars all over the place and beating up on Monk. They handcuffed him and took us to jail. But Monk didn’t back down.

If he thinks he’s right, he sticks by what he thinks. He stood there and defied the judge. If they told him to say something, he said nothing. Finally they let us go, and I said, ‘Monk, you’re sure some stubborn black man.’” Although the incident occurred as late as 1958, it indicated Monk’s stubborn defense of his own point of view, an attribute that made it difficult for him to find work in the 1940’s. The established booking agencies refused to deal with him. A club owner in Detroit, terrified by Monk’s glowering intensity, asked the police to throw him out of a club in which he had been engaged for a week. Other owners refused to serve Monk liquor or told him that their three-year-old sons could play better piano. Monk endured the abuse without losing his humor. Once he was hired with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins for a one-night stand at a club in New York, but Rollins never arrived. When Monk tried to collect Rollins’s pay as well as his own, the owner refused. “Man, you’re twelve drags,” Monk said. “Ain’t you got no ears?

I was playing twice as fast.” Monk’s fortunes fell to their lowest ebb in 1951 when he was arrested for possession of narcotics. Detectives found a package of drugs within a few feet of a car occupied by Monk and some friends. Although known to be “clean,” Monk refused to implicate anyone else. Nellie implored Monk to exonerate himself, but he hated the idea of being thought “a drag.” He silently served 60 days in jail. After his release, the police took away his cabaret card, which prevented him from working in New York nightclubs. The next six years seemed interminable. Unfounded rumors had it that Monk was in jail or locked up in an asylum. The disc jockeys seldom played his music. Nellie worked as a seamstress. Occasionally Monk found a job out of town, but mostly he remained on 63rd Street, playing the piano in the kitchen and cooking for his children. His son, Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr., was born in 1950; his daughter, Barbara, in 1954.

Monk dressed as carefully as his circumstances allowed and could be counted upon for a small sum of money if an unemployed musician showed up in need of a loan. “I didn’t get raggedy,” he said. “They thought I’d become a bum, but I fooled ‘em. I stayed on the scene.” His music sustained him. During those bleak years of worry and debt he composed more than 50 tunes now becoming familiar to an increasingly appreciative audience. Unlikely many of his contemporaries, Monk resisted the clichés that soon developed in the new style. His own compositions combine the driving force of traditional jazz with the oblique ironies of modern jazz. Monk’s percussive melodies, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, move in wide leaps—characteristically in intervals of a seventh, a ninth, or a flatted fifth— across intricate, insistent rhythms. His sense of formal development gives his music a buoyant solidity that distinguishes it from the work of any other jazz musician. Charlie Rouse, seeking to describe Monk’s sound, called it “hard but soulful.” Monk composes slowly, only as the mood comes upon him.

His intense concentration permits him to write music in a room loud with the noise of a radio, or even sitting in his son’s red wagon on the sidewalk. Sometimes, as with Crepuscule for Nellie, a ballad for his wife, he will think about a tune for three months before he puts it on paper. Lately Monk has taken to composing music in the house of the Baroness Panonica de Koenigswarter, the sister of the third Baron Rothschild. A friend and protectress of New York jazz musicians, the baroness lives in Weehawken, N.J., surrounded by 40 Siamese cats. Pannonica, a tune that Monk wrote for her in the late 1950’s, later became the theme for the soundtrack of the French film Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Always seeking perfection, Monk demands the same from his sidemen. At the first of several recording sessions before he went to Europe this spring, he painstakingly wrote down the harmonic progressions of a tune called Shuffle Boil for Butch Warren, his bassist. After the quartet had recorded 13 versions of the tune, Warren complained about the complexity of his rhythms.

“I’m trying, Thelonious,” Warren said, “but I can’t seem to get it right.” “I don’t believe in the word ‘try,’” Monk said. “I believe in the word ‘do.’” To a saxophonist who once advanced a similar complaint, Monk said, “You have an instrument, don’t you? Either play it or throw it away.” In the spring of 1957, Monk regained his cabaret card and moved in the Five Spot Café on the Lower East Side. Without any but the most perfunctory publicity, the crowds soon came. “Every place I work,” Monk said, “they try to keep it a secret, but I always did have people standing around watching me. I made it on my own, without the help of no agents.” The following year the Down Beat critics poll elected Monk the best jazz pianist. Subsequent reappraisals by the critics invariably mentioned the “long-lost” or the “forgotten” Monk, and then discussed the “urgent beauty” of his compositions. In 1963 Columbia records signed Monk to a five-year contract and began advertising him with adjectives usually reserved for popular singers.

Monk’s talents have won him global acceptance, but he still feels easiest in New York. Asked, “What is jazz?” he once answered, “New York, man. You can feel it. It’s around in the air.” The first time he played a concert in Switzerland, he was asked how he liked the lakes. He said he preferred the lake in Central Park, a chauvinistic answer, characteristic of him. He believes his 1954 Buick is the best car in the word, that he is married to the best wife, lives on the best block in the best town and, despite his various troubles with established authority, is a citizen of the best country. A critic soliciting musical opinion once asked him to name his favorite vocal group. Monk nominated Fred Waring, on the ground that he “is the only guy that sings the Star-Spangled Banner right.” Monk has accepted his success without surprise, but he remains slightly suspicious of the attendant publicity. “I was playing the same stuff twenty years ago, man,” he says, and nobody was painting any portraits.” He nevertheless enjoys his new affluence.

He likes traveling first class on airplanes and usually carries a bill of large denomination, either $100 or $1,000, on the theory that “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.” But if he indulges himself with the toys of wealth, the same belief in himself that sustained him during the lean years now enables him to avoid the equally destructive temptations of commercial success. Whereas many successful musicians subside into a repetitious formula, Monk continues to experiment. Standing in the shambles of his apartment, his children off at New England boarding schools and his wife asking him whether he wanted to take his green suede shoes to Stockholm, Monk gazed at the ceiling and said, “The only cats worth anything are the cats who take chances. Sometimes I play things I never heard myself.” Whereupon, it being three a.m. on a cold night, Monk decided to walk around the corner for a quart of strawberry ice cream. He asked Nellie if she thought he should change his shirt. She said it would not be necessary, but she wanted to know how long he would be out. Monk promised to return in less than half an hour.

He got all the way to the front door before he realized he had forgotten his boots. With the apologetic smile of an absentminded but obedient husband, he went meekly back to fetch them. Outside in the street, walking in the shadows of the warehouses on 11th Avenue, the lights of the Jersey piers glowing cold and far-off across the Hudson River, Monk listened to the wind rattling empty tin cans in a vacant lot. He looked at the sky and said: “You know what’s the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence.” Monk: The High Priest of Jazz Thelonious Monk Biography - life, family, wife, mother, young, information, born, drugs, contract, house Thelonious Monk Biography Englewood, New Jersey African American musician, composer, and music director/conductor Thelonious Monk was an important member of the jazz revolution that took place in the early 1940s. Monk's unique piano style and his talent as a composer made him a leader in the development of modern jazz.

Teaches self to read music Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The first musical sounds he heard were from a player piano that his family owned. At the age of five or six he began picking out melodies on the piano and taught himself to read music by looking over his sister's shoulder as she took lessons. About a year later the family moved to the San Juan Hill section of New York City, near the Hudson River. His father became ill soon afterward and returned to the South, leaving Thelonious's mother, Barbara, to raise him and his brother and sister. Though the family budget was tight, she managed to buy a baby grand Steinway piano, and when Thelonious turned eleven she began paying for his weekly piano lessons. Even at that young age it was clear that the instrument was part of his destiny. As a boy Monk received training in the gospel music style, accompanying the Baptist choir in which his mother sang, and playing piano and organ during church services. At the same time he was becoming initiated into the world of jazz; near his home were several jazz clubs as well as the home of the great Harlem stride pianist James P.

Johnson, from whom Monk picked up a great deal. By the age of thirteen he was playing in a local bar and grill with a trio. At the Apollo Theater's famous weekly amateur music contests, Monk won so many times that he was eventually banned from the event. The New York scene In 1939 Monk put his first group together. His first important gig came in the early 1940s when he was hired as house pianist at a club called Minton's. It was a time of dramatic innovation in jazz, when a faster, more complex style was developing. The musicians for this new music, called bebop, created it virtually on the spot. Yet while Monk was important in inspiring bebop, his own music had few ties to any particular movement. Monk was Monk—an original—and the proof was in his compositions. As the 1940s progressed and bebop became more and more the rage, Monk's career declined. In 1951 he was arrested with Thelonious Monk. AP/Wide World Photos . pianist Bud Powell on an extremely questionable charge of narcotics (illegal drugs) possession.

Not only was he confined for sixty days in prison, but the New York State Liquor Authority removed his cabaret card, without which he could not get hired for local club dates. For the next several years he survived only with the help of his good friend and patron the Baroness de Koenigswarter. Eccentric behavior causes trouble The strange behavior that Monk displayed in public sometimes got him into trouble. In 1958 he was arrested, undeservedly, for disturbing the peace, and his cabaret license was revoked a second time. Forced to take out-of-town gigs, he was separated from his two main sources of stability—New York City and his wife Nellie. His odd behavior intensified as a result. During one episode in 1959 in Boston, Massachusetts, state police picked him up and brought him to the Grafton State Hospital, where he was held for a week. Toward the end of the 1950s Monk began to receive the prestige he had for so long deserved. His late 1950s recordings on the Riverside label had done so well that in 1962 he was offered a contract from Columbia.

As a performer he was equally successful, commanding, in 1960, two thousand dollars for week-long engagements with his band and one thousand dollars for single performances. His December 1963 concert at New York's Philharmonic Hall, a big-band presentation of originals, was for him a personal landmark. In the early 1970s Monk made a few solo and trio recordings for Black Lion in London and played a few concerts. Beginning in the mid-1970s he isolated himself from his friends and colleagues, spending his final years at the home of the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter in Weehawken, New Jersey. After playing a concert at Carnegie Hall in March 1976, Monk was too weak physically to make further appearances. He died on February 17, 1982, in Englewood Hospital, after suffering a massive stroke. Along with Miles Davis (1926–1991) and John Coltrane (1926–1967), Monk is remembered as one of the most influential figures in modern jazz.

The music Monk left behind remains as some of the most innovative and unique material in all of music, jazz or otherwise. For More Information

Question: Which instrument did Jazz musician Thelonius Monk play?
Answer: PIANO